Glasstry news

I should work up one or two substantial pieces about George Brown before his 200th birthday November 29, but other things interfere.  More correspondence, instead, and another aspect of Victorian moral principles. Apparently this letter exists in George Brown's handwriting, but there is no confirmation it was actually sent,  The intended recipient is thought to have been Malcolm Cameron of Sarnia, lawyer, temperance advocate, Clear Grit radical turned political independent, and a frequent rival of Brown's.  It is published in Careless, Brown of the Globe Vol 1.  Thanks again to Russ Chamberlayne. 27th February, 1857 Globe Office Toronto My dear Sir: It is said here that your mercantile affairs are irretrievably embarrassed, and that you are quite disheartened about it. I yet trust the case may be exaggerated, but fear there is some truth in it. You may doubt it, but I assure you nothing that has happened in a very long time has grieved me more and I have been think...

I deny not that in this protracted contest words were spoken and lines were penned that had been better clothed in more courteous guise.  But when men go to war they are apt to take their gloves off, and assuredly if one side struck hard blows the other was not slow in returning them.... It is the incumbent duty of the reform party, dictated as well by their most cherished principles as by justice, and good policy, that a full share of parliamentary representation according to their numbers, and generous consideration in all public matters, should be awarded to the catholic minority [in Ontario]... This the reform party has done voluntarily, gladly, without condition, although a vast proponderance of the catholic electors will in all probability cast their votes in the coming contest against our candidates and for our opponents.   (George Brown, letter to the Roman Catholic Committee, March 1871, arguing why Catholics should support the Reformers rather than the Conservat...

...if their sensibilities are so nice that what does not suit them must be held as insulting -- they must just be insulted accordingly....   The Globe, Tuesday April 2, 1850 Not much into trigger warnings, the old Globe .

George Brown's advice about what the United States needs from us: ...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him. This is actually from an anti-slavery speech Brown gave in 1852.  The disgrace was slavery, which would endure another dozen years. But in these times,  it has a contemporary ring, except maybe for the sensitive part.. H/t Russ Chamberlayne

I think we will make what remains of November into George Brown Days around here.  Not that other coverage will cease but we'll try to have a little something, praising or critical, pretty regularly in the run up to his 200th birthday November 29. Let's start with Andrew Coyne's tribute to Brown from the spring of 2017: It was Brown who first championed, in the pages of the Globe , the idea of a federation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, conjoined since 1841 as the single, though decidedly not united, province of Canada, as the solution to the impasse and instability that had enveloped its politics. He it was who committed the reborn Reform party, cobbled together out of various political factions � moderate Reformers, Clear Grit radicals and Lower Canadian Rouges � to the same proposal, and it was his motion, and the report of the all-party committee he chaired, that led to the idea being adopted by Parliament in 1864.